It’s beginning to look a lot like ….

A Christmas themed drag show.

It’s the sparkly little jaunty top hats.  I went too far.

It certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas … not with this weather!  Mostly it’s just constant, shitty rain, but it’s not even that cold out.  I still have my windows open at night when I go to bed.  Helps air out the wet dog smell that is now a staple in my olfactory life until, like, July.

I bought a little Christmas tree for the first time in years.  Usually I don’t bother, because I feel confident that it will just get knocked over.  It’s only about 3 feet tall, so I figured – how much damage could the bastard four leggers do to it?  Day one – they knocked it over.  We had a serious talk about aluminum baseball bats, broken legs and how Christmas trees are supposed to stand on their base, like London guards, not recline against the expensive tv, like drunken holiday revelers.  It has since remained in an upright position.  However, a new complication has developed, which is that SOMEDOGS in the house continue to confuse the Christmas tree skirt with a potty-pad.  Santa may not be visiting the house this year, but I am left little puddles and turds as gifts under the tree pretty much every day.  The peril of living with small dogs whose sphincter muscles clench up at the mere hint of rain, I guess.  I can take them out for an hour’s worth of cavorting all over the property (an hour of miserable, torturous, cold, wet, deathmudly adventures in the bowels of hell, and accounting of which I will face on my day of reckoning, claim The Littles) and we will come inside and someone will immediately poop on the tree skirt.

Most amazing, I have never once caught one in the act.  Ninja poopers, one and all.  I am thinking of replacing the skirt with a potty pad for my own sanity.  If only they made them in festive colors or designs.

Even though I don’t catch them at it, I am pretty sure Gemma is the worst culprit.  It’s been two years since I brought her home “to give her a couple of nice weeks before she died.”  TWO YEARS.  No good deed etc.

You can tell by her skeptical expression that she is no fan of Christmas, celebratory anything, or having a good time of any kind.

Yesterday it was actually sunny outside, and I tried to make her come with us and got this look, which loosely translates to “f*ck you, I’m not stepping off this porch, did aliens visit you in the night and suck the brains out of your already mostly empty head, you cockeyed twit.”  Not even with a question mark.

The other Christmas tree skirt defiler in the house is probably this:

But unlike Gemma, who is 400 years old, he is only 4 months old, so he is forgiven.  He hasn’t been in existence long enough to understand that Santa frowns on dogs crapping on his holiday.  Also, he is frickin’ KEY-UTE!  He is a chihuahua X yorkie that an elderly woman I know purchased as a “lap dog”, but she failed to check the specs before she did, because this little guy goes 0-60 in seconds and he’s burns around like he’s trying to REVERSE TIME.  He is insanely active and I think he has more than 4 legs, and all of them are trying to jump on something, or scale it, or pummel it to smithereens.  He’s so adorable, and so much fun.  He’s like 4 lbs of furious joy.  I said I’d take him off her hands and find him a more appropriate home and I’d like to say the look on her face was regret, but I’m pretty sure she was going to crack open a cold one the second the door shut behind me.

Since he lived in a small apartment with a single old lady for the first month or so, he was all afraid of the other dogs for about 8 minutes.  Now he’s all about getting his Tinydog on, with gusto.

He’s scheduled to get his, ahem, “gustos” removed and then he will be ready to go a new home.  Want him? He’s pretty awesome. And his ears are out of this world.

Easy is still not the “ginormous beast” everyone predicted he would be.  He’s not as tall as Dexter (yet) and he isn’t packing on muscle and expanding sideways either.  He still has a really big head though.  And no neck.  It’s like his head balances directly on his shoulders.  And he is getting quit the coat now too.

Such a nice dog – he plays with the tiny puppy all the time too, but never squishes him. Because Fae taught him that if you squish a tinydog, it will launch into the air, pierce your cheeks with a million little sharp shark teeth and suspend itself from your face until you beg for mercy.

“f*ckin’ rights you do.  You’ll beg, bitch.”

It really was a beautiful day yesterday; we enjoyed so much lovely, relatively warm, outside time.

Wootie caught – and ate – a rabbit.  A big rabbit.  He ate the whole rabbit.  This is TWooie’s “I can’t believe he didn’t leave me any of it” face.

And now the horrible, no good, very bad rain is back with a vengeance.  And with storm wind warnings to boot.  Lived here for 5 years without the power ever going out; it’s gone out three times this winter alone.

We’ve wrapped up our holiday photo sessions now for another year.  This was my favourite one: a woman brought her dog specifically to get his photo taken with Bumble.  It turns our her mother, who had just passed away, was the voice of Mrs. Claus in the 1964 stop-motion animated classic Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.  So I whipped her up this little piece, which she really liked.  Christmas and all :)